🚌🍿 Paterson

A bus driver called Paterson drives a bus in Paterson, New Jersey, and writes poems in a notebook before his shift and in his lunch break. The film is one week of his life, Monday to Sunday. He walks the dog, has one beer, listens to his passengers. Almost nothing happens, and one thing does.

Sunday evening, two weeks after Perfect Days, which is the reason I looked for it. Library disc, a pot of tea, Jonas drawing beside me and looking up for the dog.

They are the same film from two sides. In Tokyo the routine protects the attention. Here the routine protects the writing: he does not have a writing life and a driving life, he has one life in which the lines arrive between stops. He never tells anyone he is a poet. He shows nobody the notebook and keeps no copy, which I watched with my hand over my mouth, as someone with three backups.

It is the best film I know about 🔹 Write 300 words. Not the count. The fact that it happens at the same seat at the same hour, and is allowed to be small.

• The poems on screen are plain: a box of matches, a line of rain. They are the right size for a lunch break.
• His wife repaints the house in black and white, bakes cupcakes to match and sends off for a guitar. He is the steady one, she is the weather, and the film likes them both.
• Each day opens with the same overhead shot of the two of them waking. By Thursday I was looking forward to it.

Filed under 🧭 Steadiness with the other one. I did not write that evening, and for once that felt like a day off and not a lapse.

• Monday breakfast: a box of matches turned over in his hand, and by the time the bus pulls out it is the start of a poem.
• The twins. His wife dreams of them in the first scene, and after that the town is full of pairs.
• The girl waiting for her mother, who reads him her own poem about rain from her own notebook. Two poets, one of whom says so.
• The bar, every evening: one beer, the wall of local heroes, a chess game the barman is playing against himself.
• The bus breaks down late in the week. The only emergency in the film is handled by asking a child for a phone.
• Saturday night, and what he finds on the floor when they come home.
• Sunday, the bench by the falls: a visitor from Japan, a short conversation about poetry, and a present with nothing in it yet.